ROCK 'N' HORSE: ROCK'S HEROIN CONNECTION

by Deena Dasein (December 1996)

"Before it was cool to be a junkie these guys had it down
pat." That's how the Brit-accented afternoon Chicagoland rock jock
recently intro'd the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden."

Junk, horse, smack- it goes by a multitude of endearing
nicknames. We are now in the year of the horse, whatever the
Chinese calendar says. Heroin's hip.

It's hip with rock fans, who've always had some drug of
choice, along with their favorite band. And it's used by rock
musicians, as evidenced by a host of revelations about best selling
90s' artists. Nirvana, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains,
and Stone Temple Pilots are some of the better known. A junkie in
the band hasn't kept them off the cover of Rolling Stone, hasn't
kept their videos off MTV, and hasn't hurt their album sales.
Perhaps the real meaning of alternative is heroin, as opposed to
pot, acid, coke, or ecstasy.

Rock isn't the only industry currently addicted to the
mystique of horse. Hollywood hypes heroin too. Recent movies
popular with the avant-youth audience, such as "Pulp Fiction,"
"Killing Zoe," and "The Basketball Diaries," featured the drug. "Trainspotting," in which heroin has the starring role, is the defining movie of the year.

Urban Outfitters sells Irvine Welsh's novel, Trainspotting, on
which the movie is based. A recent flap in the literary world saw
another writer, and former heroin user, Will Self accuse Welsh of
"never having injected heroin." Welsh has had to defend himself against this libel.

The rock book of the year, Please Kill Me, has hardly anything
to say about music. It focusses on the proto-punk New York scene
and its fascination with heroin- copping it, shooting it, and dying
from it.

Even the current fashion pages have been criticized for using
models that visually represent the gaunt addict. Oprah did two
shows on herion in September and a piece in Details indicates that
8th graders can't wait to try heroin.

The junkie Beat, William Burroughs, has worked with or been
sampled by a batch of rock musicians in the '90s. His visage adorns
the T-shirts of the coffee shop crowd.

Heroin is hip, in part, because it is harnessed to death. Sure
you can die from shooting up cocaine. Even alcohol kills- not only
from cirrhosis of the liver and traffic accidents; you can also
encounter the grim reaper by choking on your own vomit in a drunken
stupor. But if it's death you're after, heroin has got the others
beat by a mile.

Death has always been the great rock career move, but it has
to be done right. Heart attacks, strokes, and even cirrhosis don't
quite cut it. Diseases of old age, fading away rather than burning
out, are not career enhancing departures.

Dying well in rock needs two elements to work - the body has
to be relatively young, and the cause of death should be some sort
of Dionysian excess. The Stones and Beatles are in their fifties.
Chuck Berry is over 70. When they go (and yes, like you dear
reader, they eventually will go) their deaths will not be great
career moves.

The best rock death is from a drug overdose. It is the
equivalent of Christians being burned at the stake or being eaten
by lions for their faith - it is the martyrdom that leads to
sainthood.

And heroin kills. Not always, but like Russian Roulette, play
it long enough and the odds are that you'll take the bullet. Heroin
has the aura, and some statistics to back it up, of a form of
suicide. A soft one. It's not like blowing your brains out with a
rifle. Right, Kurt?

Heroin's dirty dance with the grim reaper gives it a Romantic
aura. "When I'm closing in on death," Lou Reed croons in his ode to smack. "Heroin, be the death of me," he commands. Rock, especially in the sixties, has been pervaded by an ideology of Romanticism. And, depite, or perhaps because of, the triumph of the postmodern - Romanticism's antithesis and archenemy - the Romantic ideology stubbornly persists. Attenuated and in tatters, to be sure,
Romanticism still shrouds rock, particularly the musician as a
creative artist.

Romanticism. Recall the 19th century poet maudit, like
Rimbaud or Verlaine, the tortured soul who suffered for his art.
Living a dignified bourgois life was seen to be inimical to real
art. The artist used a variety of drugs to call forth the creative
muse, went mad, and died young.

Under the sign of Romanticism rock has embraced mind-altering
substances- from vast quantities of beer and Jack Daniels, to pot,
acid, 'shrooms, heroin, speed, and cocaine. When alterntive
consciousness can be reached naturally, as with schizophrenia,
that's cool too. Think of the cults around such naturals as Syd
Barrett, Roky Erikson, and Brian Wilson. And do you think that
Wesley Willis' current following is due to the quality of his
music?

Heroin is sought out by musicians partly for its mind-altering
properties. It removes one from the practical world. And the
Bourgois is nothing, if not practical. The high is intensely
pleasurable. As Reed puts it: "When I'm rushing on my run And I
feel just like Jesus' son." Good god!

For most continual users, heroin's major function is not to
provide pleasure, but to remove pain. All types of pain-
psychological, physical and the practical work-a-day variety.
(Craving smack after one has developed a relationship with the
stuff gets to be the major pain that another dose removes.)

Steven Tyler, the more vocal half of Aerosmith's drug-addled
Toxic Twins, has not been reticent about his longtime affection for
horse. "You're gonna always dream about it," he says longingly. Part of its attraction, he explains, is that "it slows life down and turns off the overintellectualizing part of your brain."

The Romantic belief is that creativity requires the absence of
the rational, that "overintellectualizing" kills the artistic
spirit. If one believes this to be true, using heroin may, at least
for a time, actually aid the creative process.

The Romantic ideology preaches rebellion against the straight
society. Youth culture in last half of the 20th century is a mass-
mediated succession of promotions of transgressions. Thumbing one's
nose, so to speak, at middle class propriety; EpatÈ le bourgeois.
Rock did this from the beginning. In the fifties, bump'n'grind
dancing to doo-wop and the acceptance of "race music" [R&B] by
white audiences outraged the "good folks". The democratization of transgression picked up speed as the number of "youth" in the population, and their affluence, increased. During the late sixties
the Woodstock generation's use of marijuana and LSD, and its long-
haired males, gave the bird to the keepers of society's standards.

Skipping past the trespasses of the past quarter of a century,
we now have the youthful cool of tattoos, thrift-shop fashion, and
body-piercing. And heroin. The bourgeoisie is not amused. Their
party, the Republicans, have fought back, with Nixon's attack dog,
the late Spiro Agnew's denounciations of pot, Reagan's "Just Say
No" guard-dog Nancy, and Bob Dole's "Just Don't Do It" campaign sound-bite.

The Rebel-as-Romantic-Hero, Romanticism once removed, also
feeds heroin's hipness. Rockers in the '60s admired old blues and
jazz musicians- many who'd used horse. Later rockers admired not
only those same people, but the sixties rockers who also used the
drugs. How many latter day rockers took Keith Richards or Jimi
Hendrix as their role models? "Mr.Brownstone's" creator, Guns
N'Roses' Axl Rose, declares: "We're competing with rock legends,
and we're trying to do the best we can to possibly be honored with
a position like that." And now the new guys on the block, presently
unknown, are into heroin because, as one band member explained
"They think it's gonna make them like Guns N'Roses, man."

The current heroin fad among rock musicians should come as no surprise.
They have the same demographics as junkies: males, between the ages
of 18-34, without college degrees and the professional jobs
advanced degrees permit. How many accountants do you know of who
have O.D.'d on heroin?

Heroin use in the U.S. has generally increased in the '90s,
although reliable statistics are hard to come by. One good estimate
comes from hospital emergency rooms, which report an uptick in
people being brought in who've overdosed on heroin.

Smack is not (yet) sold in glassine packets via vending
machines. But for those working in the demi-monde of rock,
connections are not hard to find. Groupies, fans, and industry
personnel will help cop stuff. Once you get above the five-guys-in-
a-van touring level, the ubiquitous flunkies will fetch anything.
M&Ms with the red ones eliminated? Sure. Women? Easy. Horse? Of
course.

And with a hit record or two, price is no object. Surrounded
by a managment team that takes care of all the practical things
that the rest of us need to do for ourselves, like get food, wash
clothes, and arrange travel, rock musicians, like street bums, are
separated from the discipline of reality.

As Courtney Love puts it, heroin is "the drug you do if you're
in a fuckin' four-star hotel and you can order all the goddamn room
service that you want and you can just lay in bed and drool all
over yourself because you've got a million bucks in the bank.
That's the drug you want to do if you want to be a kid forever."

Let's not tell Bob "Just Don't Do It" Dole, but, ideology and image aside, alcohol and a variety of illegal substances have some
practical value. All work involves tension, frustration, and
aggravation. How we deal with them is only explained in part by our
unique personality. Cultures of coping develop - martinis for
execs, coke for commodity traders, and, judging by their girth,
highly caloric food for grade school teachers.

The dirty secret is that heroin is useful for rock musicians.
On tour, it evens out the excitement of playing to exuberent,
enthusiastic crowds for an hour or two a day, and the boredom of
the "hurry up and wait" that takes up most of the time on the road. Also, because the drug is not a social enhancer. it is a way of
getting privacy, and on tour privacy is at a premium. Heroin draws
you into yourself, pulls a curtain around you, creates a private
jet.

Appearances aside, performance anxiety is hardly rare. An
unnamed musician, interviewed in Spin, admits that "heroin is the
perfect drug for live performing... With the right amount, it just
relaxes you, but it doesn't take your muscle coordination away."

And if touring is stressful, how do you handle life off the
road after constantly touring for many months or years? With a
little help from your friends, is the answer given by many band
members.

"Heroin was life without the anxiety," Aerosmith's Steven
Tyler recalled fondly, after he was supposedly clean.

Heroin is also of great practical use for rock careers,
because it gets publicity, rock music's life-blood. "Today's heroin
vogue is such that artists seem to seek credibility by confiding to
journalists about their use of smack." writes a straightfaced
scribe in Rolling Stone. How convenient.

Discussing how the rock media sensationalizes heroin and
capitalizes on the public's fascination with it to sell magazines
makes this article not just a little suspect. It's not unlike the
local newscasts during TV sweeps month, with their stories tsk-
tsking the strip clubs- film footage at 10. So for those of you
who've wanted the sensationalism, the side-bars [ALL THE PEOPLE WHO
OD'd/ AND THOSE WHO HAVEN'T (YET)] are for you.

Drug use, once it becomes public knowledge, is one of the most
crucial parts of the celebrity text of an artist or band, a factoid
that has to be mentioned in any artist's profile. The rock media is
at its best when an artist dies of a drug overdose- obits are their
pride and joy.

In July, Philip Anselmo, the lead singer of Pantera, collapsed
after a concert in Dallas. His record company dutifully (it was
publicity after all) sent a statement thither and yon, indicating
that Anselmo said he had injected a lethal dose of heroin and died
for 4 to 5 minutes. "There was no lights, no beautiful music, just
nothing," he said. Will every interview with Anselmo until the end
of time refer to this? Wanna bet?

But the question remains- why is heroin hip NOW?

Is it merely something different, a new fashion that replaces
the old one? Each generation wants its own stuff, needs to
distinguish itslef in some unique mode, from earlier ones. In the
age of retrorock, body piercing and heroin are the fashion
accessories for the '90s. They've replaced the coke spoons of the
Reagan youth.

Or is it the next step (up or down?) in youth transgressions
something that trumps the previous generation's rebellious moves?
After all, the parents of 1990s youth were the pot smoking, acid-
tripping members of the Woodstock generation. If youthful rebellion
requires behavior that "whitens mother's hair," heroin does up the ante.

Then, too, junk resembles the current stampede to personal
computers. Both have become quasi-commodities that are relatively
inexpensive, more powerful, and easier to start-up and use than
they were in the past. Users of both need to keep giving their
dealers more money to satisfy their joneses. The computer industry
has to actually invest in upgrades and advertising to keep
customers coming back for more. The heroin industry, a capitalist's
wet dream, has no such overhead. The increased purity of heroin has
allowed users to avoid a big turnoff to first-time users - the
needle. The ever-helpful smack seller now offers two brands, cut
with different chemicals- one for shooting up and one for snorting.
So it is now possible to start a habit more easily. It's also
possible to remain a "chipper"- a weekend snorter who doesn't
graduate to the syringe.

Ease of use, a new fashion of a new generaion, and ratcheting
up the transgression ante- are these sufficient explanations for
heroin's current hip status? I think not.

Look at the subculture that has most strongly embraced heorin-
the Seattle-based grunge community. While the good-folk of the
Northwest coast sipped their drug of choice at Starbucks, the music
scenester was, as Alice-in-Chains put it, a "Junkhead."

"What in G-d's name have you done?" Alice's junkhead singer Layne Staley asks in "G-d Smack." His response to his rhetorical query is "stick your arm for some real fun."

"When the grunge thing first started happening," an insider recently quoted in Rolling Stone relates, "I never met a band out of Seattle that wasn't either dabbling or full-on heroin addicts."

Grunge features singers whose voices are as expressive of pain
as their lyrics. Listen to Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Layne Staley,
Billy Corgan, or dozens of other grunge frontmen. This is not a
joyful noise. They bellow their pain and whisper it. They exude a
defeated rage - "I'm still a rat in the cage." Nevermind. Whether or not these singers, and the fans who dig by their music, actually use heroin is not the point.

Smack's main claim to fame is as a pain reducer. Hell, Bayer,
those purveyors of aspirin, sold heroin a hundred years ago as the
ultimate snake-oil painkiller. Heroin's ultimate is its deep resonance with a generation that
feels itself in great pain.

There is still another point that adds to the drug's hipness
today. Users are termed addicts and they are seen to need
professional medical help. In the '90s heroin has changed its
meaning; it's been resignified. Getting a habit no longer gives you
a Keith Richards outlaw-chic aura. No, today you are an addict -
someone who has no control over their lives. You need help.
Profound help. You are a victim of the drug.